Hi all,I just published my current soylent recipe – check it out and let me know what you think. There's a lot of additional sourcing and nutritional information (and photos) on the blog post, but the recipe itself I'm pasting below:

Wow. I'm totally blown away by this recipe, Zach! You have really, really done it. This is the sanest and most accessible soylent recipe I've seen yet. I've been working on my own "RealFoods Analogue Soylent" from exclusively food ingredients I already had on hand (being flat broke at the moment), and I came up with something very similar to this, but as yet probably not as well-balanced for micronutrients. I'm greatly tempted to stock up ingredients for your recipe whenever I manage to scrape up the cash. My one caution would be that you may be underestimating the persistence of the oat powder's phytic acid -- just wet chilling for several hours probably will not mitigate it at all. What evidence I've been able to find indicates that not only do raw oats require lengthy presoaking, perhaps light fermentation, and subsequent cooking, but that they also need to be combined in the process with a strong source of phytase (ground rye and/or buckwheat, e.g.), because oats have practically no phytase. Check out this article for full details Living with Phytic Acid by Ramiel Nagel.

Congratulations on a job superlatively well done, and thanks for posting the actual recipe right here on the forum where everyone can read it without having to go to another site or download anything.

I will look into phytic acid more when I get a chance – but AFAIK right now, the dangers of phytic acid are limited to inhibiting the absorption of micronutrients. They don't actually hurt you directly.

If so, then I'm not particularly worried about them at the moment, because I have more problems relating to too much micros rather than too literal (e.g. iron and manganese). But I would like to get a finer point on this for the next recipe.

@zach Thanks a lot for posting this.There will be any improvement on the recipe soon? or should I go and buy everything xD?

In Europe Emergen-C is not commercialize, could you tell us a substitute? In europe multicentrum is quite popular or Opti-men.I would prefer Whey Protein, what happens with the calcium and iron? I would appreciate if you can make a recipe using whey protein and the multivitamin that better complement it.

G_Force said: Again I'm not trying to discredit you FlameRunner but without a source for your information or even an explanation as to what the "potential risk" is it's hard to take your point seriously. My main concerns: pseudo-estrogen and amino acid profile. For me, that's enough to not use soy protein. But it's only my opinion. If you've found research results saying it's fine to use soy then just use it.

What about the pseudo-estrogen and amino acid profile of they soy protein? does it worth the risk? wouldn't be better whey protein or iso protein?

What about the pseudo-estrogen and amino acid profile of they soy protein? does it worth the risk? wouldn't be better whey protein or iso protein?

I've found significant research in my Whey vs Soy thread to warrant that "risk" nonexistant and zach has also found this link proving the same thing.

The ideal solution although more complex is to combine a mix of both soy and whey protein to achieve the best from both categories as zach has suggested however the average person would be fine with just soy protein isolate.

ruipacheco
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2013-06-19T12:07:34Z —
#14

What would you replace brown sugar with?

lsparrish
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2013-06-20T01:09:36Z —
#15

I just tried this, and so far so awesome. However, since potassium is not available in stores I am skipping it for now. I was wondering, would tomato paste or powder make a good substitution?

zach
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2013-06-20T02:23:47Z —
#16

@graiden: I don't plan to revise this recipe anytime soon. There are many revisions built into it though, if you read the blog post.

Most of your questions are actually answered in the blog, such as:

You may use any source of Vitamin C.

You may substitute whey protein, but you'll need to add a multivitamin to replace the micros in the TJ's brand of soy protein. I suggest two such multivitamins in the post, which I ran the numbers for against the other ingredients. Use one of those. As for calcium and iron, you'll be better off on iron if you use whey (this recipe is high in iron), since whey has less than soy, but you'll be too low on calcium, so you should add about 5 mg calcium citrate.

Depends, what are you trying to do? Personally I use coconut sugar, because it tastes awesome, it's less processed, and it reportedly has a lot of potassium and other minerals in it (would like to see third-party verification).

But it's really just for additional carbs and for taste. Use whatever sugar and whatever amount works for you (including zero).

zach
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2013-06-20T02:48:26Z —
#18

lsparrish said:

I just tried this, and so far so awesome. However, since potassium is not available in stores I am skipping it for now. I was wondering, would tomato paste or powder make a good substitution?

Awesome! On potassium/tomato paste, wow, that is a novel idea. I would personally add it to this recipe, because cocoa + sugar + tomato sounds unpleasant, but I'm sure there are good savory recipes to be made with tomato.

[added and removed edit about Vitamin A]

Read the potassium information in the blog post, if you haven't already – one of the things I said there is that it's not the end of the world if you skip the potassium, because while 1.2 g (in the other ingredients) is unhealthily low, but relatively common in people's actual diets. So I'd recommend you try it without potassium, read all the safety information in the blog post, and optionally order supplemental potassium citrate/gluconate online.

lsparrish
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2013-06-21T01:03:20Z —
#19

Cool, I won't stress about the potassium. I added a 6oz can of tomato paste to my most recent batch of 3 meals to see what would happen. The taste was not as good as before, but not terrible. Maybe it would be better with less cocoa. Adding more water seemed to help.

As to vitamin A, I'm told beta carotine is nontoxic, since the body only converts what it needs. So the worst I would have to fear from such a dose of beta carotine is improved eyesight.

Also, surprisingly, paste has far less vitamin A proportionately to powder. Perhaps the cooking process destroys it. This page lists it as 427 IU vitamin A, and 284mg of potassium per ounce. 10.5 ounces is 3000mg potassium and 4,500 IU of vitamin A.

zach
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2013-06-21T02:51:57Z —
#20

lsparrish said:

As to vitamin A, I'm told beta carotine is nontoxic, since the body only converts what it needs. So the worst I would have to fear from such a dose of beta carotine is improved eyesight.